Business and Professional Ethics Journal

Volume 34, Issue 1, Spring 2015

Practicing the Healer’s Art
An Agentic-Relational Approach to Negotiation

This article explores the prevailing assumption of instrumentalism in negotiation and argues that contrary to the popular conception in negotiation scholarship, negotiators need not be assumed to be ontologically individualistic or purely self-interested in their motivation and action. We show the contribution that can be made to the field by an approach to negotiation that does not presume a strong and inevitable self-interest as the fundamental starting point of any account of negotiation behavior and we offer ideas for an alternative starting point, which we call the agentic-relational model.